Death on the Nile - 1978

What a shame, so many good actors and such a mediocre film, it's unbelievable! I mean: Maggie Smith! as Miss Bowers, Angela Lansbury! as Mrs Salome Otterbourne, Bette Davis! as Mrs Van Schuyler, Mia Farrow! as Jacqueline De Bellefort, David Niven! as colonel Race: wow. I love them all. There were also Jane Birkin as Louise Bourget, Lois Chiles as Linnet Ridgeway (according to the credits .I thought it was Lynette, I'll read the book again..), George Kennedy as Andrew Pennington. They were good enough too. Hercule Poirot was played by Peter Ustinov, a big name indeed, but not a good Poirot. He looked angry when he should have been sad, and the screenplay only made it worse, because in this film so much time is wasted while Poirot 'shows us' the same scene with all the different characters, to show us that each one of them could have been the murderer, because saying 'they all had motive and opportunity' wasn't clear enough in 1978, apparently...
They waste so much time that, if you think about it, none is left to show us a tiny bit of actual investigation. Poirot does nothing else but being rude and unpleasant to everyone, while the real Poirot would never act like that, insult everyone without reason, accuse everyone without proof when he still doesn't know anything.
 never questions anyone: a woman has been shot: has anyone heard anything? seen anything? He never asks this, which are such The basic questions to ask that anyone watching it would like to hear the answers.
Angela Lansbury is very funny in her portrayal of the drunk writer of sex-novels, and her tango with David Niven is my favourite scene of the whole thing. I've alway loved David Niven, so elegant and with such a cute smile :-)  Bette Davis and Maggie Smith had not enough space - all the more, indeed, a pity, since so much of it was wasted. I liked Mia Farrow :-)
I didn't care much for the other actors and characters. John Finch was Mr Ferguson, Simon MacCorkindale was Simon Doyle, Olivia Hussey was Rosalie Otterbourne, who gets engaged to the young man Ferguson, contrary to the book, but this was not the only change they made. They had little time left to show actual story, so they deleted a few characters, changed colonel Race's mission entirely, as well as the identity of the thief...